The Inheritance
···Granny Ryu is dead? But she corrected herself just the other day?
Only yesterday, we had shared dinner together.
It was a perfectly ordinary day, no different from any other—and yet.
I couldn't believe it.
"Are you sure you're not mistaken? Last time she was just sleeping in, and everyone made a fuss about it."
"No, this time it's real! I checked with my own eyes! A merchant brought some fine herbs as a gift, and when we tried to give them to her···"
"No point arguing back and forth. Let's go see for ourselves."
But the result did not change.
At first I thought it was some tasteless prank, but after the village chief sent adults to confirm, they came back and announced Granny Ryu's death a second time.
Not a prank—cold, hard reality.
At the shocking news, the village atmosphere, which had been lightly buoyed by the influx of outsiders, sank once more.
"Well, well. So the inevitable has come at last."
"Hoo··· I did wonder why she seemed so quiet today···"
"At that age, it's only natural. Wait, how old was she, exactly?"
"Well past three digits, easily. Hers is a long-lived race."
The village chief sent people to prepare Granny Ryu's body—she had no family to speak of—and to sort through her house.
Alta, too, silently followed the procession.
Two days later, around noon, when the heavily overcast sky cast shadows that made it hard to believe it was even daytime.
The villagers paid their simple respects, dressed Granny Ryu in clean garments, and held her funeral.
The method was cremation.
The custom had developed because burying a body in the ground would only turn it into prey for monsters with sharp noses.
Crackle···
Branches piled up like a small mountain.
The flames, several times larger than a campfire, flickered and licked at the air.
Granny Ryu's body was already hidden from view behind the crimson blaze.
The smell of burning human flesh unpleasantly teased the tip of my nose.
"Not exactly grand, is it."
"A village like this can't spare days for a proper funeral. The living have to keep living."
"Fair enough···"
To be honest, this wasn't my first funeral like this.
Given how this village lived with danger always at its doorstep, deaths were an occasional occurrence.
Most people died to monster attacks, leaving not even a trace behind.
When a body did remain, it was usually cremated like this.
"Bitter, isn't it··· At first I wondered if she was plotting something."
Granny Ryu had seemed suspicious from the very start.
But despite that first impression, she had shown unwavering kindness the whole time we knew her.
Thanks to that, we'd been able to ask her anything without reservation, and by now we'd accumulated enough knowledge that no one would question us wherever we went.
"If I'd known this would happen, I should have at least said thank you."
"Who could have known? She was perfectly fine just yesterday···"
"Ah, there you are."
"Village Chief?"
As we exchanged idle small talk, trying our best to dull the bitterness, the village chief approached us.
The shadows cast by the flames seemed almost alive as they danced across his face.
"Here."
"What is this?"
"What Granny Ryu left behind. Her inheritance. Your share of it."
An inheritance?
I took the black pouch the village chief handed over.
A small pouch, not particularly heavy.
"Why would you give something like this to me···?"
"Who can say? Who knows what was in the old woman's heart? Aigoo···"
The village chief, quite unlike his intellectual appearance, plopped down roughly on the dirt ground.
His knees must have been in bad shape—the way they creaked, you'd think they were dying.
"That old woman was truly a remarkable person. Honestly, without her, this village never would have made it this far. Such a precious person, gone··· Good times were just around the corner, too. What was she in such a hurry for, leaving before we got there···"
"···"
The village chief poured out his laments in a quiet, subdued voice.
They had known each other for years, so it was only natural there would be real affection there.
"But did you know? About that pouch··· it wasn't given only to you two. When I looked through her open safe, it was full of pouches meant for other people as well."
Mine was in there too.
The village chief gave a faint smile, dangling a small pouch identical in design to mine.
"···Her house was spotless. Looks like she cleaned it in advance."
"She probably knew exactly when she was going to die. Still, how could she not say a single word··· heartless woman."
I thought back to Granny Ryu's house.
We'd gone to help clean up, only to find it immaculate when we arrived.
It hadn't been that clean when we'd visited yesterday evening.
She must have tidied up after we left.
"There were so many pouches that handing them out one by one was a chore in itself. Anyway, the work is more or less done. You're free to head back. The rest will handle the cleanup."
"Yes··· we'll be going, then."
"Mm."
We left the village chief staring blankly at the flames and returned home.
"Come to think of it, distributing all those pouches to the villagers was quite the gesture."
"···True. Only the chief and a handful of others would have seen the safe. He could have pocketed everything and no one would have known."
Granny Ryu had been fairly well-off.
She'd had a small study in her house, and every piece of furniture looked anything but ordinary.
And for her to leave behind an inheritance, distributed to everyone according to a will she'd left?
At times like this, she showed none of a merchant's calculations.
"I suppose that's exactly why Granny Ryu settled in a village like this··· Now then, let's open the pouch. I didn't want to snoop while people were watching outside."
Before opening the pouch, I firmly shut the bedroom door and window.
Granny Ryu had known about our unusual circumstances, so she might have left behind something unusual as well.
"···Money."
Unexpectedly, the first thing to catch my eye from the pouch was faded gold coins.
I counted them—thirteen gold coins.
Since a single gold coin could support a family of four comfortably for three months, it was a considerable sum.
"Really, why would she give us this?"
"I believe she noticed we have no money to spend outside."
"Ah··· is that it? We do have magic stones, though."
The currency here was old and venerable—gold and silver coins served as the primary money.
But magic stones were perennially popular as quasi-currency too, whether for maintaining artifacts or for other reasons.
Stones harvested from high-rank monsters were said to sometimes possess special properties, so they even functioned as a kind of precious metal.
"Magic stones, right. Except someone keeps absorbing them willy-nilly, so we're practically broke."
"···Sorry. I suppose I should absorb magic stones in moderation."
Absorbing magic stones for points was terribly inefficient.
It was essentially giving up money for the sake of a tiny trickle of points···
Which was why lately I'd simply been hoarding magic stones for when we needed to leave the village.
Though I hadn't managed to save up much.
"Oh, these are cooking recipes. She must have written them down for you."
"There are so many I've never seen. They'll be useful."
"···And there are rings here. Two of them."
I laid the rings that had caught on my fingertip out on my palm.
Plain silver rings, unadorned by any gem.
But I could feel a faint flow of mana within them, so they were clearly no ordinary rings.
"Some kind of artifact, it seems. Two of them—maybe we're each meant to wear one."
"Those are··· the rings Granny Ryu always wore."
"Is that so? Then nothing strange about them."
She wouldn't give us something harmful at this late stage.
Without hesitation, I slipped a ring onto my finger.
Shalarak···
For a very brief moment, I felt an odd sensation, as if a thin veil had settled over my body.
But the strangeness vanished in an instant, as though it had been an illusion.
Even after carefully inspecting my body, I couldn't find anything that had changed.
I had Noah put one on as well, but she testified that she felt no particular change either.
"We can have the rings appraised later··· and this is the last thing."
"Parchment?"
The final item from the pouch was a scrap of parchment so old it had turned completely discolored.
Barely the size of a palm, it was covered in fine lines and letters engraved so small they formed a kind of geometric figure.
An ordinary person would have needed a magnifying glass to read it. My eyesight had no trouble, but it was drawn so intricately that I couldn't make out what it was.
Noah, however, identified it at a single glance.
"It's a map. Several floors are drawn in three-dimensional form, which is why it looks so complicated. Hmm··· there are a great many places where the paths are cut off. Traps as well."
"A map of where··· you obviously don't know."
"I believe I do."
"Hm? How?"
"Look here."
Noah pressed her finger to the very edge of the parchment.
Only after reinforcing my vision could I barely make out the spot she was pointing at.
The only chamber on the map shaded in black.
"What's that supposed to be?"
"It appears to be a hidden chamber, does it not? Does nothing come to mind?"
"A hidden chamber···? Ah! Don't tell me—Obsidian!"
A conversation with Granny Ryu from about a month ago surfaced from some corner of my mind.
She'd mentioned a rumor that there was an unopenable room in the deepest part of the ruins.
Could this be a map of those very ruins?
It was a wild leap of speculation, but nothing else came to mind.
"That's what I think as well. However, the map only depicts the interior of the ruins—there's no indication of where the ruins themselves are located."
"Hmm··· Granny Ryu could see the future. Maybe she left this because she knew we'd reach that place someday?"
"That's possible. I've memorized the entire map, so I'll burn it. Just in case."
"Wait, you memorized the whole thing?"
"Ha, you say the most obvious things. This is nothing."
Right, she's an AI···
In fields like this, Noah was effectively a perfect memorization machine.
Living with her, she felt so much like a regular person that I forgot sometimes.
Tap! Tap!
I opened the window and let the wind carry off the ashes of the burned parchment.
The smoke from the burning parchment slipped out along with them.
Having sorted through all of Granny Ryu's unexpected inheritance, I felt oddly restless.
"By the way, isn't this a breach of contract? The deadline we agreed on hasn't even passed yet, and she runs off somewhere we can't reach. From the looks of it, she knew the day of her own death in advance, too."
"Heh. Should we run away too?"
"···Don't say things you don't mean. She left us an inheritance like this—we should just think of it as a penalty fee."
"She had a cunning side, didn't she. Granny Ryu···"
Her attitude had been somewhat transactional, but now that we'd received her inheritance, the contract with Granny Ryu weighed even more heavily on my heart.
To slip away so cheaply like this···
After this, no matter what happened, there'd be no running away.
Less than two months remained until the deadline we'd promised Granny Ryu.
Of course, I couldn't guarantee something would happen precisely within that window.
Something strange could occur as soon as tomorrow.
"Judging by how things have been going lately, it does seem ominous."
"We'll have to stay careful."
The more observers there are, the more the future becomes fixed—or so they say?
Granny Ryu had known that, and had deliberately prophesied an uncertain future, which meant the odds were high that a crisis wouldn't arrive exactly on schedule.
The village chief naturally knew this as well, which was why he'd been preparing in advance like this.
And as if to prove my thinking right.
The very next morning, the disturbance finally revealed itself.